Book of the week: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

(Little, Brown, $35)

Welcome to Muggle-land, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. J.K. Rowling’s much-anticipated first novel for adults is set in a fictional English town named Pagford that feels “about as far from the enchanted world of Harry Potter as you can get.” The residents of Pagford are by and large a “self-absorbed, small-minded” bunch, and Rowling makes their habitat a kind of toy village in which “rooftops pop off to reveal adultery, marital discord,” even heroin addiction and rape. The story opens with the death of a parish councilman who was Pagford’s moral compass, unleashing ugly, class-based political conflict. Though The Casual Vacancy offers moments of genuine drama and humor, magic is in short supply. The novel is “not only disappointing—it’s dull.”

I wouldn’t go that far, said Ian Parker in The New Yorker. A comedy of manners that “builds into black melodrama,” the book includes “many nice touches,” particularly when Rowling focuses on the town’s teenagers. “It may be a while before we’re accustomed to reading phrases like ‘that miraculously unguarded vagina’ in a Rowling book,” but as this story “turns darker, toward a kind of Thomas Hardy finale, it hurtles along impressively.” There is, however, one problem that crops up throughout. Though The Casual Vacancy isn’t a book for children, it’s written like one. “Hidden secrets are labeled as hidden secrets, and events are easy to predict.” The sense of the author’s guiding hand was “an essential asset” in the Harry Potter books. Here, it’s constraining.

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Actually, I found her writing here quite sophisticated, said Lev Grossman in Time. As the residents of Pagford wrestle over the fate of an existing public housing project, Rowling arranges her large cast of characters “not in neat opposing ranks but in a complex web.” The Casual Vacancy is the work of a writer who “understands both human beings and novels very, very deeply.” The chances weren’t good that the author of the Potter books could make a smooth transition to writing for adults, but The Casual Vacancy is better than serviceable. “A big, ambitious, brilliant, profane, funny, deeply upsetting, and magnificently eloquent novel of contemporary England,” it would be a front-runner for the Man Booker Prize if written by anyone else. Of course its world is bereft of magic. That’s because it depicts the “painfully arbitrary and fallen world” that we all live in.